The Scarlet Ruse

I pulled the T-shirt back on and picked up the pants. They had lost some weight. I spun her and got her throat into the crook of my arm and felt around until I came upon the outline of the little automatic, pouched down into her groin. She stabbed back at my eyes, and I tightened up on her breathing until she was pulling at my arm with both hands. I slid my free hand down inside the jeans and found the gun and pulled it out. I spun her back away from me. She thumped into the bulkhead, coughed until she gagged, and said, “I’ll feel better if I’ve got it. Please?”

“Sorry.”

“You creaked my neck. You know that?”

“Sorry.”

“I wouldn’t shoot you with it. You know better than that.”

I went in. She followed me, complaining. Now her throat felt sore. I didn’t have to be so rough. Some kind of bug had bitten her on the forehead out there. See the lump it made? Why are you carrying your pants? Put them on. You look ridiculous. I went to the head to get away from her, picking up my manila envelope en route. It was the same heft, but I looked inside, just in case. All apparently in order. All yours, Hirsh, Deo volente.

Ever since one Boo Waxwell nearly brought me and friends to an untimely end aboard this same Flush, Meyer and I have improved many an idle hour trying to add surprises to the furnishings. They have to be unexpected and not complicated. Meyer is very good at it. I opened one of his. It is quick and easy. You open the medicine cabinet. It is set into a double bulkhead. The bottom shelf seems to be a part of the outer frame of the cabinet itself. But if you take the stuff off it and push it up against the pull of a friction catch, it opens like the lid of a box. I reached down in there and took out the oily Colt Diamondback, checked the load, put it back, and put its far smaller and weaker cousin beside it. The recess was deep enough to stand the envelope on end where it would not touch the weapons. I slapped the lid down, put toilet articles back on it, and shut the cabinet. Invisible hinges, a very sturdy catch, a nice deep dry hole. One of the better efforts.

I had to do some thinking before I got back out in range of Mary Alice’s noisy petulance.

I knew she had no idea of where we had come from, what our direction had been coming in. So if I headed in the wrong direction, she would not object. I wanted more open space than I had. If I could go gently aground, or appear to be aground, with a half mile of open flats on every side, I might lure the marksman close enough to equalize our skills. Like within ten feet? Topsides, in the bin, on its brackets, was the old Springfield shark rifle with the four-power scope, but the barrel was slightly keyholed and the slugs had a tendency to tumble.

She made him sound like he kept popping out of a phone booth in a funny cape and zooming into the sky. I had seem him. All right, so he looked very impressive. Our very short acquaintanceship had been interesting so far. Especially the way I had kept taking his money. And his girl.

He could use an island for a screen, and he could use Meyer, just to see if he could verify Meyer’s ill will toward me. He might bring Davis along, the one with the dark moustache. Expendable? Who knows? Murder and arson. Boats burn hot. Four can fry as cheaply as three. One good thrust with a gun butt or a solid smash with a piece of pipe and you can forget about using the family dentist to identify his work.

No, stasis was not my style. The more I thought of ways and means, the less I liked it. Running is no good either, unless it is the kind of running where you circle back and come out on the trail right behind the hunter. So tomorrow I take the Muсequita, and I wait just as close to Regal Marine as I can get. Hello there, Frank. Looking for anybody in particular?

She rattled the latch on the door to the head. “What are you doing in there anyway?”

“Thinking.”

I heard her mumble as she walked away. I came out and made another drink and fixed us something to eat. She had stopped complaining. She looked thoughtful. No thanks, she did not want to play any music. No, no gin rummy, thanks.

“Trav?”

“Yes, honey.”

“You don’t want to ask me anything else about anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s all cleared up in your mind?”

“I think so.”

“Well… okay.”

She began yawning. She came over and wanted to be taken off to bed. I told her to take herself off. She went pouting away to her own bed. I stayed up a little while trying to tell myself that everything was going to work out just right, like everything always had, almost.

But I could not get into it. I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades. The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each others faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.

Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. “But we are all like that!” he said. “That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t you know?”

I tried to believe him. But belief is a very difficult feat when you crouch out here in the night, too far from the fire to feel its heat, too far from the people to hear the words of their songs.

Chapter Nineteen

Something woke me, and I rolled out of the bed and stood half-crouched in darkness, head cocked, listening. There was a whisper and slap of very small waves against the hull, and a softer and equally regular sound of the waves slipping up into the mangrove roots and sliding back. Nothing else. I had turned the generator off before midnight.

I have learned to trust my undefined anxieties. They are sentinels standing guard. I must find out if they are being alerted by shadows or by reality. If they cry wolf nineteen times and on the twentieth time it is a real wolf, it is better to check every time than roll over and go back to sleep and lose your throat.

I moved naked through the familiar degrees of darkness of the known spaces of my home-place. The door to the other stateroom stood open. I moved two steps into the room and listened and heard a small snorting sound at the end of each inhalation and a long flaccid rattle of the soft palate during exhalation. She was in sleep. A man will sometimes imitate snoring to feign sleep, a woman never. My eyes were used to the darkness by then, and in the faint starlight of the port I could make out the dark blur of her hair on the pillow, then a suggestion of profile. She was sleeping on her back.

Before going to bed, I had checked all the locks, all the security devices. There was no way to deactivate them without starting up a klaxon that would whoop the birds awake three islands away. I wondered if someone had come aboard over a side rail and the shift of weight had turned on my silent, subjective alarm system.

In retrospect, Frank Sprenger seemed strangely more impressive. The blueberry eyes stared out from the sun-browned folds of skin. His neck seemed broader than his skull. I went back to my stateroom and pulled a pair of shorts on. It is strange how a man, totally naked, feels a little more vulnerable. It seems to be a distraction, an extra area to guard. Cloth is not armor, yet that symbolic protection makes one feel at once a little more logical and competent. Doubtless the hermit crab is filled with strange anxieties during those few moments when, having outgrown one borrowed shell, he locates another and, having sized it carefully with his claws, extracts himself from the old home and inserts himself into the new. The very first evidence of clothing in prehistory is the breechclout for the male.

When I had rolled from the bed, I had plucked the Air-weight from its handy bedside holster without conscious thought. I put it back where it belonged and got the M35 Browning out of the locker. It is a 9mm automatic pistol with a staggered box magazine, so that it has a fourteen-round capacity. It fits my hand, and I like it. It goes where I point. The way to get that instinctive relationship with a handgun is to tape a pencil flashlight with a very narrow beam to the barrel, exactly in line with it, and rig it so that you can comfortably turn the beam on for an instant with thumb or finger. Then stand in a room in the dusk, turn and fire, spin and fire, fall and fire, at the lamp, the corner of the picture, the book on the table, a magazine on the floor. Point naturally as if pointing the forefinger, arm in a comfortable position, never bringing it up to the eye to aim. An hour of practice can develop an astonishing accuracy. After that you practice in a secluded place with live rounds.

I am being turned off handguns. Meyer did it. He made three casual statements, apropos of gun legislation. He said, “The only two things you can kill with a handgun are tin cans and people.” And he said, “Way over half the murders committed in this country are by close friends or relatives of the deceased. A gun makes a loud and satisfying noise in a moment of passion and requires no agility and very little strength. How many murders wouldn’t happen, if they all had to use hammers or knives?” And he said, “Studies have shown that if a person is not a psychopath, not a soldier, not a cop, there is only a one in ten chance they can bring themselves to fire a gun directly at a robber.”

So there has been a diminishing pleasure in the look and the feel of handguns and in the ability to use them. I am even beginning to dislike the shape and feel and smell of them. But as long as I pursue a career in my version of the salvage business, I am going to affront people who yearn to read my obituary. So the weapons are tools of a precarious trade. Just as, I suppose, a carnival fire-swallower might find it useful to keep some fire extinguishers handy. He might even hate fire extinguishers because they are reminders that something might go wrong, but unless he is an idiot, he will keep them within reach, fully charged, and know how to use each one.

Out on the deck I was in a brighter world. I kept to the heavier patches of shadow. I made two circuits, stopping, listening, waiting. The damp wind was out of the north, warm and steady. A nightbird went by, shouting of doom in a hoarse, hopeless voice, even laughing about it.

I eased back into the lounge and reset the master switch and listened again. It was almost four in the morning. I tucked the pistol into the belly band of the shorts, the metal slightly cooler than the night air. I knew I had taken on a load of adrenalin that would take an hour to be so totally absorbed I could sleep. As I neared my bed, I heard her speak in her sleep. “Marf? Shugunnawg. Whassa-whummer?”

I went in. She whined, rolled her head back and forth, whined again, and turned onto her side. So one of those words had probably alerted the sentinels and turned on the alarms. She was down inside her head, asking questions.

I sat on the bed, put my hand on her shoulder, and shook her. She came fumbling up the dark ladder. “Wha-shawanname, Frank? Crissake. Oh. Whassamarra?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

“Come on, McGee. I never even dream.”

“Everybody dreams, M.A. Some people remember more than others. You were talking. You woke me up.”

“Talking? The hell you say. What about?”

“Asking questions. But not in any language the world has ever known.”

“How do you know they were questions?”

“Rising inflection. Marf? Whassawhummer?”

“Oh boy. Marf. Where are you? Oh. Well, anyway, I asked questions. You certainly didn’t ask many.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re looking down at me from somewhere, and I can’t see you. Come down here some.” She pulled at me. I stretched out and put my feet up. She put her head on my shoulder and rested a fist on my chest “You know what I mean about questions,” she said.

“Do I?”

“You’re so tricky. You know? You left me waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like anybody would think you would ask about how come Jane got the other stockbook printed with Frank’s name.”

“I assumed you asked her, saying you’d run out soon.”

“Sort of like that. I asked for spares for all the investment accounts, because Lighthouse stopped making that kind, and if they had names on, we wouldn’t make a mistake and sell them out of stock. Well… what about me telling you she poisoned me?”

“Window dressing. You were sick one day. And remembered it later, when you needed more window dressing. And those numbers on the sheets to indicate arrangement were for your own benefit in making up the junk book. And you invented that bit about how upset she was long ago and about her talking about going away. You can’t check anything out with a dead lady. She can’t verify conversations. And people have smashed up a house to conceal a search.”

“Okay. You’re so smart about everything, aren’t you? You didn’t even have to ask me about how much more I knew about the whole thing, did you?”

I stopped breathing for about two seconds and hoped that it had not been noticed and interpreted. If I were to ever be certain, I had to make the whole thing seem casual, unremarkable. I had to make my indifference persuasive. So I yawned widely and noisily and turned toward her, stripping the coverlet down below her hips, the better to hold and stroke and caress her.

“Hey, no problems, huh?” she said.

I slipped the pistol under the pillow. I yawned again. “No more questions about old Jane, honey. I know you killed her.”

She turned her mouth away from me, stiffened, caught my moving wrist, held me still. “You are so damned sure,” she whispered.

“Forget it,” I said. I worked on her, trying to bring her along, trying to soften her tensions.

She pulled back again, “Why are you so sure?”

“I told you all the reasons it wasn’t kids.”

“But if it was a person trying to make it look as if kids had done it, why me?”

“Does it matter one way or the other? Forget it, honey.”

She tried to forget it. I could feel her trying to let go, trying to let her body take over. She pushed me away. “Wait a second. Please. Look. Is there any proof?”

“When Fedderman finds out the good stuff is missing out of stock and finds out you are gone without saying goodbye, what do you think it’s going to look like?”

She tried to shake me in her exasperation. “But proof, damn you!”

“Relax. Nobody saw you coming or going. You didn’t leave anything behind. They are even buying your version of when it happened.”

“My version?”

“You set the electric clock in the bedroom ahead to two-fifteen, then you yanked it out and heaved it at the wall.” I wanted to hold my breath again. Instead, I gathered her close, kissed her throat. She sighed. “The thing about it, darling,” she said. “I really liked her. I really did.” She sighed. Her breath had a trace of the staleness of sleep. “What do people expect a person to do when they don’t leave you any kind of option at all? Know what she was going to do?”

“No. Who cares?”

“Stop a minute. Put yourself in my place. I didn’t go to her house on my own. She asked me to come there. To talk. Or else. The way she sounded, I parked a ways off. She got hold of me at Hirsh’s. Okay, so I cut that sort of short and went to her place. She was waiting for me, very cold and unfriendly, all dressed to go out. Know where she was going? To tell Hirsh and make him phone the police. Oh, she’d figured it all out that it had to be me. She knew how. Not exactly, but too close. Stop a minute. I made some offers. I begged her. I pleaded. I turned on enough tears for a fountain. And then she saw what was going to come next, so she ran, and I caught her and grabbed her, and we both fell down in the doorway. I was very mad at her. She was underneath, on her face, and I got up and pushed her back down and kneeled on her back and got hold of her hair and yanked up and back. It made kind of a crunchy little sound, and she went soft as butter. Yeck. All loose, sort of. I thought she was dead then, but I guess she lived a while. I sat down and thought it all out, and then I found red rubber gloves under her sink. I took the money out of her purse and wrecked the whole house and left.”

“How did you keep from getting all spattered with all the stuff you broke?”

“I didn’t. What I did first was take everything off and put a shower cap on my hair. I just wore that and the gloves, and took them with me when I left. I got splattered. After I was through, I took a shower and got dressed. I tried not to look at her at all the times I went past her. I really was awfully fond of Jane. Do you forgive me?”

“Do I forgive you?”

“Oh, I knew you’d understand, my darling. You scared me, being so sure. I tried to think of everything, even that back window to make it look as if a small person had gotten in that way. There was so much to do and to think about, that’s why I was late getting to your yacht club. I was late and very nervous and scared.”

“Nobody would have known it.”

“Remember when you kissed me for the first time and I went off down the little beach to think?”

“I remember.”

“Right up until then I was going to keep on with Frank. Then I realized that I had really bitched him up, the way that trouble with Jane came out. What I should have done was tell Frank right away and let him handle her. Being so very cautious about things, the way Frank is, I knew just what he would do to keep from being linked up in any way with Jane’s death. I knew the son of a bitch was going to try to make me switch back, put the good book back, and sneak the junk out of the bank. Then he would cancel the deal, take the good stuff and arrange to have it sold, and try to come out practically even. Where would that leave me? I decided it better be you from then on, not Frank. It was the only way I could keep the whole thing. Poor Frank. By now, from the way I ran, he’s figured out that I killed Jane and I’ve got the goodies. He knows that Fedderman will probably yell swindle and report me missing. And there is no way in the world Frank can keep from being brought into it. Even if he keeps it quiet that he even knew me outside the bank, he is going to have to explain where all that cash came from. I guess he can, but he’s going to look like a very dumb person. I don’t think Hirsh is going to have to pay him back. I don’t think Frank will live that long. I guess I love you, McGee. Do you love Mary Alice?”

“Immeasurably.”

“Well… now you can prove it. With-Oh, goddamnit, you’re gone again. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“I think I know what woke me up.”

“I can tell you something that didn’t.”

“You can’t set a trap to catch a trap.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I can’t very well surprise your chum by getting to him a lot earlier than scheduled, because that is exactly what he is doing. This is important to him. Why should he give a stranger a schedule and stay with it? Besides, if he is a marksman, why should he come in at dusk, with night coming on? Dawn is better. And not far away. Welcome, Frank boy.” I was thinking aloud.

She was gone, abruptly. She knocked the shade off the fixed lamp, found the switch, ran around the foot of the bed to my side, made some small gobbling sounds and ran back to her side.

“Frank?” she said. “Here? Soon?”

“Settle down. We’ll play it as if he were going to show up about dawn. Today. Every day. You cooked him. You cooked him as many ways as there are.”

“What have you got there?”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s a gun, damnit. I meant, where did it come from?”

“Put some clothes on.”

“What am I going to do in them? Are we leaving? Or what?”

“Put on the pants and the long-sleeved shirt again.”

“If you think I’m going out into those bugs, you’re-”

“Shut up, will you? Just get dressed and shut up.”

“You can’t tell me what to-”

“I can take you out onto the bow, with a deck chair, and tie your arms to the arms and your feet to the footrest, and your neck to the backrest and leave you there and see how good a shot he is.”

“Now come on! I don’t mind jokes, but when you-”

I stood up. “No joke. The more I think about it, the better I like it.”

She let her mouth sag open as she looked at me. And then she swallowed without closing her lips, an effort that made her throat bulge and convinced me she was taking me seriously.

“You mean it!”

“Just shut up and get your clothes on.”

She did. It did not take her long. She went into the head and came out with her hair brushed glossy and a new mouth in place.

“Can I ask you something, Trav?”

“Like?”

“What makes you think he’s coming here?”

“It’s too long a story.”

“Okay.”

I put on khakis, and a dark green knit shirt with short sleeves, and old deck shoes. She followed me up to the sundeck. I went forward and stepped up onto the rail and hooked an arm around a stanchion for balance. I looked south through the nine-power Japanese glasses. Though there was a line of gray in the east and the glasses had good light-gathering qualities, it was like looking into a smudge pot. I couldn’t even find a horizon line.

I dropped back to the deck, looked around, trying to organize something. Running would indicate to him that I’d guessed right. He would have to assume Mary Alice had told me everything useful. Not running would indicate innocence or stupidity or some of both. It might be the best answer. I discovered that I was trying not to think of Meyer. If my guess about Sprenger’s actual schedule was right, Meyer could have been subjected to some sudden and very ugly persuasion. Stubborn old bear. Weird old economist.

Think, damnit! Like the little signs IBM used to distribute before they suddenly realized that if it were ever obeyed, if men everywhere really began to Think, the first thing they would do would be to take a sledge and open up the computers. A few are doing it already, sly seers, operating in sly ways. They have to guard the computer rooms these days. A little alnico magnet, stuck in exactly the right place with a wad of chewing gum, can erase a hundred thousand units of information before they find it.

Think! But the Flush felt like a ponderous toy, something in a foolish game for over-aged children. Meyer and I had been using it as a treehouse, hiding the secret words, the pacts, the membership list, the slingshots, and the Daisy Air Rule. Now a real live man was going to come across the flats and blow the treehouse out of the water. Maybe I could get out the old bubble pipe and waft some soap into his eyes.

Prediction. He would have to have Meyer with him, because though Meyer could find No Name from the remembered shape of it, he certainly could not describe to anyone else how to find it.

Prediction. He would have someone with him. He would not want to rent a skiff with an outboard himself or send Meyer to rent it. The safe play would be to send a third man, with instructions to come back in the skiff from Regal Marine and pick them up.

So then, three of them. If he brought “Dave Davis,” which seemed possible, it would make a goodly weight of meat in the rented boat. He would want a good boat, for capacity and for speed. Regal Marine certainly catered to some very early-bird fish freaks. Predawn rentals, so you can get out to the feeding grounds by dawn, aching to hook into the King of All of Them.

Once he had found us and identified us, Meyer’s function would be ended. Once Sprenger had killed us and located the investment account items aboard the Flush, the third man’s portion of the job would be finished. I did not care to use up any mental energy speculating about how he would handle everything from then on. I would not be able to care.

The band in the east widened until it began to shine gray upon the world. The islands began to show, in a thin milky mist. So this one, No Name, was too close to the Flush, and we stood too tall beside it, to make it good cover for a boat moving toward us. It would have to be the island in front of us, over a hundred yards away.

It was light enough, or would be by the time I got the hooks in and the Flush cranked up, to retrace the winding, unmarked channel back south to good water. Live to fight another day or run again. Or meet up with Sprenger and company under the worst possible conditions. If there is anything more vulnerable to sniper fire than a pleasure boat in shallow waters, I would like to hear about it. Maybe those Texas sportsmen who used to shoot the sand hill cranes from cover as the big ungainly birds came gliding in for a landing had found something easier to kill. Suppose I did manage to disappear? What would then happen to Meyer? He could wear a sickly smile and say, “Mr. Sprenger, they were supposed to be here!”

So whether he came at dawn or at dusk, the problem was the same. Instead of having all day to think about it, I had a fraction of an hour.

Go wait for him in the mangroves? Set the scene here so he would… A rusty gear in the back of my mind groaned and turned. The dry bearings squealed.

“What’s with you?” she said.

“Always try on the Indian’s moccasins,” I said.

“What?”

“You’ll see what I mean when I get through. If I have time to finish. Here. Take these. Use this to focus. You keep sweeping that area over there. If you see any kind of a boat coming toward us or moving across that area, sing out.”

“Where’ll you be?”

“Busy.”

Chapter Twenty

It didn’t take too long to prepare the major elements of the scene. I warned Mary Alice to hang on when I backed the Flush off and then rammed her up into the mangroves, with a great crunching, crackling, settling, listing. I took the Muсequita away from the island over to water the right depth, and pulled her plug. She had enough floatation so she would stay up completely awash, but I didn’t want her drifting, so I put her on the edge of a sand bar. She ended up with water almost covering the pilot seat, the other seat canted up and out of the water. I smashed her windshields with a wrench. I had taken the Winslow life raft out of the hatch. I fitted the paddle together, popped the yellow raft as fat as the air from the cartridge would inflate it. I had to be very careful walking on the bar. It was love time for the sting rays, and they were thick, almost buried in the sand and matching it in color. They averaged eighteen inches across. There is never a bit of trouble if you scuff your feet. They shake themselves out of the sand and go skimming off, underwater fliers with leathery wings. Halfway back to the Flush, I stopped paddling and looked at the Muсequita. Her plight touched my heart. She was abandoned, a derelict. The sun had changed from deep red to orange to a blazing white just above the horizon, promising a blistering day.

When I climbed aboard, she looked down at me from the sun deck and said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“You’re supposed to be watching.”

“Okay, okay. I’m watching.”

“Have you got with you any kind of hat that Frank Sprenger would know and remember?”

“He isn’t much for noticing clothes. Unless he’s bought them for you. I like big floppy cloth hats with big brims. I’ve got a red one that’s really red, and he kidded me about it.”

I swarmed up and took the glasses and got up on the rail and searched. I saw a dot moving across the glassy sea a long long way off. I hustled her below, and she got the hat out of one of the suitcases she had planned to leave behind. It was more than red. It was a vivid scarlet. I dug around in a forward gear locker and found the old fenders I should have thrown away, but was saving in case I had to use them in a lock somewhere, with the sides of the lock black with oil. They were of ancient gray canvas, stained and worn, and filled with matted kapok. They were cylindrical, about thirty inches long and as big around as her head.

I tried the hat on one and it fitted.

“You have fallen out of your tree,” she proclaimed.

“You are going to be hiding, minus the long black hair, and this is going to be your body, floating in that two-man raft.”

Once she got the idea, she helped. She did give a small cry of desolation when I gathered all that hair into my left fist and then gnawed through it with the kitchen shears between hand and skull. She fastened it into a long fall with rubber bands. I taped it to the fender. I wanted a lot of weight in the raft. I checked on the distant boat and found it closer each time. I used a spare anchor, wired to all the fenders, and a lot of canned goods to overload the rubber raft. I threw a blanket over all the junk, tucked it down, shifted the stuff around to look like a woman shape under the blanket. The fender with hat and hair was at one corner of the raft, shining black hair spiffing out from under the scarlet brim to lay in sharp contrast against the yellow rubber.

I took it out quickly, wading, swimming, pushing it, and used a small mushroom anchor to hold it into a very gentle tide current so that the red hat end was toward the island I thought he would use as cover when approaching.

When I climbed up onto the Flush, she was standing there, looking quite changed with her hair gnawed off ragged and short. She was staring out at the raft and held her clasped hands close to her throat. When I turned and looked, I saw what caused the curious expression on her face. It was better than I hoped. It was spooking her. She floated out there, dead in a raft. I wondered if she had ever really been able to comprehend the fact of her own eventual and inevitable death. Today, my friends, we each have one day less, every one of us. And joy is the only thing that slows the clock.

When I got the glasses on the boat, they brought it so close I had the startled feeling they could see me as clearly as I could see them. Three of them, in a pale blue boat, proceeding very slowly, angling from my left to my right. From there I knew they could see the white of the superstructure of the Flush through the trees on No Name. I estimated they were a little bit less than one mile away, and they were moving very slowly because they were crossing the shallows. The direction indicated they were moving over to where they could turn toward No Name in the concealment of the island a little over a hundred yards west of me. Yet I could not be certain they were not merely early morning fishermen.

I went below and got back in a hurry, carrying the spotting scope. I turned the eyepiece to the sixty-power click and used the angle between the rail and stanchion as a rest. Sixty power makes an object at six thousand feet look one hundred feet away. The narrow field made it very difficult to track a moving object. They were coming into deeper water and picking up speed. I caught them in quick and momentary glimpses. It was one of the countless imitations of the Boston Whaler, with the central console where the operator can stand and run the big outboard by the remote controls. I could not catch the man running it. He seemed big enough to be Davis. The time I got him in focus long enough, he was looking south. I saw a planter’s hat with bright band tipped forward, jammed down on his head to keep the wind from whipping it off. Yellow shirt.

Meyer sat on the stowage box in front of the console, leaning back against it, arms folded. Or tied? Folded. He wore his old souvenir hat from Lion Country. The white hunter variety, with a plastic band stamped to imitate leopard. Frank Sprenger was in the bow, sitting on the casting platform. He wore a black T-shirt, white shorts and a bright orange baseball cap with a long bill, and big dark sunglasses. He held a fishrod in his hand, pointed straight up. He wore binoculars around his neck.

When I saw those, I backed down and away. She was waiting for me on the side deck, swallowing frequently.

“On their way,” I said, answering the question before she could ask it.

“What do we-”

“Now listen. Carefully. We’ve got ten minutes, probably more, before Sprenger gets in position. He’ll leave his friend in the boat, and he’ll wade to that end of that island, where the sand bar is. The other end is in water too deep, and this end is closer to us. Okay now, what he would want to do would be get comfortable, get a nice clear field of fire through an opening in the mangroves where they begin to thin out, and then wait until we were both on deck and then drop me first and then you. I think he would want information to keep from wasting time in search, so he would drop me with a head shot or a heart shot and get you through the legs.”

“It makes me sick even to listen to-”

“So he is going to look and find the kind of ruin he might have caused himself. Both boats disabled and your body in that raft. Somebody got here first. That thing about moccasins, I was trying to say that it is the kind of thing he would accept, would believe had happened. His little world is falling apart anyway, and so this is one more rotten disaster he hadn’t counted on. But it isn’t going to make him reckless and impatient. He’s a careful man. He’ll wait quite a while, I think. He’ll watch for some movement by that dummy in the raft. Sooner or later he’ll have to satisfy himself. I think what he’ll do is sink the raft. Then wait a while longer and finally come aboard, maybe alone, more probably with friend.”

“Where will we be!” she demanded, her voice stretched thin.

I took her below. It was beginning to heat up below and would get considerably worse. I warned her to expect it and endure it. Silently. She wanted her little weapon, so I traded it for the other two manila envelopes and put them in the same hiding place as the one she had given me. No point in having Sprenger find her two and decide that was the batch and leave.

I took her down into the forward bilge and through the crawlway and up into the rope locker. Even though she was a big big girl, there was room for her and a lot of anchor line, and there was ventilation of sorts. I told her she could sit with her feet dangling, but when she heard anybody, or if she heard anybody coming through the crawl-way, to pull her legs up inside and pull the door shut and slide the little bolt over to lock it from the inside. I made it emphatic. “Stay right here no matter what you hear, what you imagine, what you think. Don’t try to think. Just stay until I come after you. Get cute and we’re both dead.”

“Where will you be? What are you going to do?”

“Take care of you. Shut up and wait. Not a sound. I’ve got a good place. I’ll get the jump.”

I left her there and went and opened up my good place, stocked it with what I thought I’d need, left it open and ready. I went to the galley and knelt and looked cautiously out of the lower right corner of the fixed glass opening by the booth that adjoins the galley.

I had thought it would give me a view of everything. The angle was slightly wrong. I could see the yellow raft and the wreck of the Muсequita and most of the nearby island, but I couldn’t see the sandbar end of it. I could see to within ten feet of where I guessed he would take up his position. Now be as patient as he.

I could not have told Mary Alice the truth about what I wanted to do. I wanted the ruse of the raft, the red hat, the silence, the disabled boats, to lure them aboard, Sprenger and friend. I had the idea they would save Meyer for some conversations once they saw my stage setting. Tie him to the mangroves while they came aboard the Flush. And then, when I had my opportunity, I would merely pop out of my secret place, sap the nearest one behind the ear with a delicate twist of the wrist, hold the other one under the gun and yell boo. Turn him around and darken his world too, then truss them both with utmost care and diligence. Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat around. Use the big anchor and the power takeoff winch to pull the Flush out of the mangroves. Cork up the Muсequita and rig a pump and float her. Take both small boats in short tow and retrace the winding channel back to the main channel, and put Meyer, with a cold brew in hand, at the wheel, while I make a call through the Miami Marine Operator to one Sergeant Goodbread. Sergeant? This is McGee. I’ve got something for you.

No problems. Virtue prevails. A brisk encounter, made successful by the element of surprise.

Every ten minutes I looked at my watch and found that one more minute had gone by. I could hear a distant hysterical laughter of terns scooping up bait fish. I heard a jet go over, very high. I heard a drop of my sweat splat onto the vinyl floor.

My pants were dry, salt crusty, and now beginning to darken with sweat around the waist. The boat shoes were still damp. The wind was slacking off. I could see the water turning glassier. The bugs should come up out of the mangrove and grass marsh and shorten Sprenger’s iron patience.

He would not be emotional now. Now it was a chore. He had been brought in from Phoenix six years ago on more of a basis than his pretty face. If punishment for trying cute tricks is quick, merciless, and permanent, fewer attempts are made, and the whole interweave of cooperation and concession runs more smoothly. If unaffiliated strangers come to the city to undercut the going street prices, and they are found long dead in an elegant apartment beside their long dead girls, fewer strangers come to town to go into business. If a man testifies before the grand jury and they find his head in a hat box in a coin locker at the airport, all grand juries accomplish less.

I changed position. My legs were cramped. Come on, Frank! I happened to be looking at the raft when I saw the scarlet hat leap into the air all by itself, along with the flat echoless smack of high velocity across water. The hat jumped up about a foot, leaping toward the middle of the raft. The impact knocked the fender forward, so that it slipped down below the round yellow bulge of rubberized fabric. It pulled the hair with it, so that only a small fringe still hung over the round of the life raft, visible from the island. I could not have hoped for a more realistic effect.

The raft began to sink at the foot end. There were three more shots, spaced one second apart. The raft settled more quickly and almost level. It disappeared. Air bubbles belched up. Then there was just the red hat, floating high on the water, but beginning slowly to settle as the salt water soaked into the fabric.

There was a silence of perhaps five minutes, and then the spaced shots began again. Six of them. I saw where they were going when the second one sent red dust into the air from the lens of the port bow running light of the Muсequita. He shot her lights off and the little chrome knob off the top of the ensign staff and the little elbow off the top of the windshield wiper.

He certainly wasn’t using any target rifle, not at that rate of aimed fire. The sound had a vicious, stinging quality about it. Six shots gave me a vague clue. It was probably a bolt action, small-caliber, high-velocity load job, like that.243 Winchester Special, which dropped about a half inch in the first hundred yards, firing a seventy- to eighty-grain slug at a muzzle velocity of around thirty-six hundred feet per second.

Boats have a personality, a presence, a responsiveness. Little Doll had done her damned well best at all times for me, and I had sunk her onto a sand bar so somebody could shoot her bangles off. It had to be confusing her.

There was a shorter wait, and this time the six shots came smacking at The Busted Flush. I heard the ship’s bell ring and the dying scree of ricochet off brass. Crash and tinkle and zing. Thud and whine and whizz of splinters.

Just about enough time for a reload and it began again. One got into the galley and clanked around among the pots. Then a lengthening silence. My cue to disappear. Tall white rabbit hops back into top hat.

I had bet Meyer that I could go aboard the Flush and hide and he could not find me in a two-hour search. He knew the old houseboat well. We bet one hundred dollars, plus welching privileges, which means that if you lose, you can buy the winner a very good dinner and try to renegotiate your loss.

He did not know that while he was up in Montreal for a week, listening to people read papers on international currency and exchange, I had found an exiled master carpenter from Cuba. When you open the door to the head, you are in a short corridor with the master stateroom at your right, the guest stateroom at your left. Affixed to the bulkhead straight ahead is a full-length mirror, already installed when I had won the houseboat in a poker game. I had done some measuring. The little Cuban was amused. He said it was possible. He moved the interior bulkhead out a few inches. He went around into the galley and made a tall provision locker a few inches shallower. He removed the mirror, cut a hole just a hair smaller than the mirror, put a brass piano-hinge down one side of the tall mirror and reinstalled it. I tried it for size in there. If a man does not have a swollen gut, even a large man takes up surprisingly little space if you measure him back to front. Less than twelve inches. But it was too dark in there. I located a good piece of two-way glass at an exorbitant price, and he installed it in the mirror frame. It was much better that way.

The Cuban removed every trace of his highly skilled labor. He devised a simple but solid catch which would hold the mirror-door closed and could be released by inserting a long wire brad into an almost invisible hole on the right side of the mirror, in the bulkhead next to the frame. For the occupant there was a simple turn block on the inside. He did a lot of winking, because he thought it was where I planned to tuck the errant lady when the husband came storming aboard. I did not advise him that I had never gone in for the middle-America hobby of scragging the random wife at any opportunity. But there had been a lot of times when people had come aboard looking for other people, when it had been unfortunate all the way around to have no good stowage area for people who would rather not be found. And as long as I had it, I thought I would make Meyer pay for it. He lost the bet. He marveled at the ingenuity, the craftsmanship. He bought me a legendary steak, a great wine, and wheedled me down to ten percent of the original bet.

They would come aboard. They would search the Flush. And sooner or later, they would both be in the short corridor between the staterooms at the same time. At which time I would pop out, the Browning automatic in my right hand, the woven leather sap in my left, all ready and eager to thump their skulls with ten ounces of padded lead at the end of a spring.

I moved toward the lounge, staying back out of sight, listening. I had the shirts memorized. White shirt on Meyer. In case of bad trouble, fire at yellow shirt or black shirt. Soon, a little sooner than I expected, I heard the unmistakable sound of more than one man walking through thigh-deep water. I couldn’t tell if it was two or three, only that it was more than one.

So I nipped back to my safe and secret place. I’d left the mirror-door standing open. It was still open. The mirror lay on the corridor floor, and the biggest piece was smaller than a dinner plate. One of those twelve shots had come angling down the corridor or had spun off something or…

What now, big white rabbit?

Terror is absolutely nonproductive. It is not worth a thing. So if it is new to you, you don’t know how to handle it, and it can freeze you. But if you have felt it before, many times in many places, you know that if you can start moving, it will go away. You can’t spend time thinking, or you will freeze up again. You have to move without thought. It can be like shifting into some rare and special gear, some kind of overdrive seldom needed and seldom available. I dipped down and picked the pistol and sap off the floor of the useless refuge. They were going to come into the lounge from the aft deck. It was the logical approach for them. And it was the only below-decks space that was large enough to improve my chances. I got there as fast as I could and as silently as I could. There was only one place in the room where I could not be seen from the doorway or from the ports. I crawled to it, to the shelter of the long curved yellow couch, and flattened out. I could look under it and see the sill of the open door. I could hunch forward a foot and a half and be able to see the whole doorway.

All right now, McGee. Forget the childhood dreams of glory. Have no scruples about firing from ambush and firing to kill. No Queensbury rules, fellow.

I heard the diving platform creak. Water dripped. There was a grunt of effort, slap of wet palm against railing, thud of rubber soles on the decking. Then the sequence was repeated.

“Goddamn the bugs!”

“Shut up!”

“There’s nobody on-”

“Shut up!”

There was ten seconds of silence. And suddenly something came bounding into the lounge. I had the impression of some animal, some vast, vital, rubbery strength that covered fifteen feet and landed lightly, poised, every sense alert. Next, a pair of big wet tennis shoes stopped by the sill, just inside the room.

The voice by the door said, “There’s nobody on this-”

I was going to have to get rid of that voice by the door to give all my attention to the animal presence over beyond the couch. I wormed forward and saw all of him, Davis, soaked to the waist, revolver in the left hand, the hand nearest me, the hand now sagging down to his side. I told the gun to go where I pointed it, as it always had, forgetting the first one was double action, missing the hand, putting the second one into the hand. He screamed and pounced for the dropped weapon, trying to grab it up with the other hand, and I hit that hand, and he went diving, tumbling out the doorway onto the deck as I spun, hitched back, looked up, and waited for the round target of the head to appear over the back of the couch. The three shots had been very close together, a huge wham-bamming sound far different than the whippy lick of the rifle, and leaving a sharp stink of propellant in the hot air.

The rifle cracked like a huge whip and laid its lash across the edge of my thigh. I suddenly had the wit to flatten out again and look under the couch. He wore white boat shoes. I had to turn the automatic onto its side to aim. I couldn’t point it naturally. I had to aim it. The shoes moved closer. I had to aim again. The side of the shoe burst into wet red, and he made not a sound. I took my chance on bounding up rather than trying for the other white shoe and bringing him down. But as I swung the pistol, he fired without aiming, a snap shot, doubtless hoping to hit me, but it worked like one of those impossible trick shots out of a bad Western. It slammed the gun out of my hand and spun it into the far corner, leaving my hand and arm numb to the elbow.

Sprenger worked the bolt quickly and aimed at the middle of my forehead and then slowly lowered it.

“You’re a damned idiot, McGee. And a damned nuisance.”

“You haven’t got a lot of options.”

He tested the foot, taking a short step on it. He did not wince, limp, change expression. But pain drained the blood out of his face and made his tan look saffron. He had shed his sunglasses.

“Meaning I need you?” He waved me back and took another step and propped a hip on the corner of the back of the couch.

“Is Meyer all right?”

It took several moments for the implications of my question, to get through to him. “You are some kind of people, you two. He’s a bright man. He knows a lot about the tax future of municipals. We had a nice talk. I’m losing my touch. I can’t read people anymore. That damned McDermit woman is insane. Was insane. Once she got leverage, it was like all she wanted was to get us both killed. I read you wrong. I read Meyer wrong.”

“Is he all right?”

“So far. He probably isn’t comfortable, but he’s all right. Thanks for letting me know he’s trading material.”

“If you could get back there to the boat.”

He looked at his bleeding foot. “Blow it off at the knee and I could get back there.” I believed him. He shook his big head. There was a glint of rue in the little blueberry eyes. “I had nearly five hundred round ones stashed, in case I ever had to run and had a chance to run. Postage stamps! Dear Jesus Lord!”

“A sterling investment, Mr. Fedderman says.”

“What could I do? She would have screamed to the McDermit brothers I was laying her.”

“There wasn’t any dear friend primed to make a report.”

He thought that over. “I couldn’t take a chance. You can see that. That woman would rather lie than tell it straight.” He leaned back and looked out the doorway. He lifted the rifle slightly and said, “Something you should know. At this range, anyplace I hit you-”

“I’m dead from hydrostatic shock. It hits fluid, transmits the shock wave up veins and arteries, and explodes the heart valves. You came close. You put a skin burn on my thigh.”

“You know a lot of things. Walk way around me slowly and take a look at Davis, from the doorway.”

I followed directions. Davis was out. He was on his face, legs spraddled, one smashed hand under his belly, the other over his head. I could see little arterial spurtings from the torn wrist, a small pulsing fountain that was as big around as a soda straw and jetted about three inches.

Blood ran into the scuppers and drained into the sea. His head was turned so I could see his face. His closed lids looked blue. His moustache was glued to white papery flesh. He had dwindled inside his clothes, but his big straw planter hat was still firmly in place. The small jet dwindled quickly. Two inches, one inch, nothing.

I turned around slowly and took a slow step back into the lounge. “He just bled to death.”

He looked puzzled. “I thought you hit him in the hand.”

“Both hands. He couldn’t stop the bleeding, using the one that wasn’t so bad.”

“You were trying to hit him in the hands?”

“Yes.”

“You’re good with that thing. But you are an idiot. If you’re that good, you could have popped up and hit me in the head and then him.”

“Call it a natural revulsion, Frank.”

“You’ve got first aid stuff aboard?”

“Always.”

“You’re going to get it and fix this foot.”

“We’re supposed to be in negotiation, aren’t we?”

He looked at me and through me, at the narrow vista of his possibilities, his meager chances. He said in a tired voice, “I build that municipal bond business from almost nothing. It was supposed to be a front. But I like it. I’m good at it. It’s what I really want to do.”

“Frank?”

“I know. I know.”

“So the pattern was kill me and the woman and Davis and Meyer, burn this boat with all four bodies aboard, after retrieving the rarities Mary Alice ran off with, and go back and run a very good bluff and hope for the best, hope they don’t find out Mary Alice killed Jane Lawson, and then tie you to Mary Alice in the Fedderman swindle. If you can get the goodies back, your best move would be cancel out with Fedderman and retrieve that junk out of the box.”

He frowned at me. “How would you know about burning? Just how in hell would you know that?”

“You must have asked Meyer some questions about this houseboat that gave him the idea you were trying to figure out if it would burn well and if it was in a place where there was no chance of anybody putting the fire out.”

He thought, nodded, and said, “Then he radioed you.”

“So you’re still on course, aren’t you? Two down and two to go. Get me to fix the foot. Get me to tell you where she hid the stuff. And you should probably have me retrieve that body out there so it won’t be floating around with holes in it, making people ask questions. Then we go over and bring the rental around, and you add two more bodies to the pyre and get out of here.”

“You’re very helpful. Why are you so helpful?”

I had to make it very good. He had to believe me. I had to be casual, but not too casual, earnest but not too earnest. “Haven’t you had the feeling, Frank, I’ve been a half-step ahead of you.”

“Maybe. Until right now.”

“Once I heard from Meyer that I could count on you making a try, why would I just sit here and wait for it? Would I be such an idiot that I’d figure I would be able to take you with no fuss? I have respect for you, Frank. As a fellow professional. I did what you’d do in my shoes. I took out insurance. I talked to Meyer late yesterday afternoon. I wouldn’t exactly say we’re going to hear bugles and look up and see the US Cavalry come riding across the water, firing their Sharps rifles. But I wouldn’t say that anything you do is going to go unnoticed.”

“Then I’ve got no chance at all. End of the line?”

“Insurance can always be canceled. Maybe I wouldn’t make a claim.”

He swung his leg out, looked at his shoe. “Stopped bleeding, at least. If it can be canceled, McGee, I can make you tell me how to go about canceling it. I found one man once I couldn’t make talk. He had such a low thresh-hold, he’d faint at the first touch. That’s the only time I’ve ever missed. And I’ve had more than a hundred people find out they had more to say than they wanted to.”

“I’m terrified. I’m not trying to be smart. I really am. You could make me tell you. I’m sure. But it would take as long as I could hold out, and I don’t think you could do it without leaving a lot of visible damage, and when you got all done, Frank, you’d find out that the only way it can be canceled is by me, in person, not on the phone, not in writing. By a personal friendly visit to my insurance agent.”

“And you want to use crap like that to make a deal?”

“Why not? Disprove it. I can get Fedderman to market the stuff. I want exactly half. I’m a practical man. I’ll put myself in your pocket to save my skin and my partner’s. I’ll write you a confession of where, when, and how I killed Davis and how I killed Mrs. Ray McDermit. I know an island near here high enough so we can bury the bodies, and I’ll put that in the confession along with the chart coordinates. Then you own me.”

“But you’ll keep the insurance in force? We’ll own each other, you mean. Can we get this foot fixed?”

“Is the negotiation all settled?”

“Half? Hell, I guess so. Let me see those damned postage stamps.”

“Later. Last night I ran over to the village in the runabout and mailed them to myself. Three envelopes.”

“Why didn’t you start with that?”

“You wouldn’t have bought it. But now you do, because if it wasn’t true, I would have started with it.”

He almost smiled. “Half. Harry Harris said he heard that was the way you go. It’s a big piece. That dumb jackass, know what he was doing? Going home at night and telling his woman all about what he did all day. Like he was a bill collector or something. If you hadn’t tipped me about the leak, I wouldn’t be buying you now. Now will you please do something about my foot?”

That word was the one which unlatched half the springs which were holding my stomach up against the base of my throat. Please. A beautifully predictive word. Stomach moved halfway back to normal position.

“There’s a first aid locker back…”

And Mary Alice thumped the door frame with her left hand as she staggered and caught her balance. She was running wet with sweat, head to toe, her face pallid, mouth open, eyes dazed with the near-fainting state the heat had brought on. She had her little automatic in her big right hand, but it was at her side, pointing at the floor.

Frank Sprenger swung the rifle toward her, and she tried to lift the little automatic to aim it at him. The rifle shot whacked, and her blue eyes bulged and broke, and she dropped straight down, very strangely, as if she were a bundle of clothing slipping off a hanger. But the little gun was coming my way, floating in the air with the momentum from swinging it up to fire it. But instead she had released it. It was moving so slowly in the air that I had time to change my instinctive reflex to pick it out of the air with my right hand and try instead with my left. My hand was still numb, and some feeling was coming back, with enough pain along with it to tell me it was broken in some way.

I could see it turning, floating, and as I reached and took it out of the air, taking it properly by the grip, beyond it I could see Frank Sprenger, out of focus, standing transfixed with the rifle still aimed down the companionway, at the empty air where her head had been.

I pointed at him and the little automatic snapped a little louder than a cap gun, and he spun and yanked the trigger of the rifle while some spectator in the back of my mind peered at him and told me that the fool had forgotten to work the bolt action. Keep firing, the spectator said. Hurry!

He came at me. Bounding. Stone-brown face under the orange cap. Huge brawny arms reaching for me. A caricature of a muscled chest, carved of hickory, moulding the black T-shirt. Bowed legs, massively thewed, bounding under the white shorts, springing him toward me, while his little nightmare blueberry eyes looked remote, impersonal, totally assured. No favoring of the smashed foot. I backed away, pointing my stupid left hand at him, the little automatic saying its futile bang, bang, bang, making no impression on him at all. He smashed me like a truck, bounced me against the bulkhead and off it to fall under him, and see that sledge fist rise high and come smashing down toward me. I rolled my head to the right, rolled it into blinding brilliance and over and over and off the edge of the world and down, the brilliance turning to a tiny white dot way above me and then winking out.

Chapter Twenty-one

I was in a big old bed that sagged in the middle. It had a tall dark headboard. There was a window over to my right. Double hung, with an area of flawed glass in the bottom pane that warped the green calligraphy of the banyan that reached so close to the window it muted the light in the upstairs bedroom.

The bedroom door was opposite the foot of the old bed. It was always open. The closet was off to my left. There was a chest of drawers beside it. There was a huge conch shell on top of the chest of drawers. There was a framed lithograph of Venice on the wall over near the window. With a gondola in the foreground. The bathroom was out the door into the hall and to the left, just before the stairs going down.

I had been there a long time. I had heard heavy rain on the roof and roaring down through banyan leaves. At every dusk the tree screamed with its full passenger list of small birds. Sometimes I could hear surf, far away. I could hear traffic, closer than the surf, high-speed trucks droning by in the night. Something with a noisy old engine came in and out during the day, dying somewhere below my window. I could hear outboard motors sometimes, much closer than the surf. Once a great blue heron landed in the banyan, so close I could see his savage yellow eye.

I could hear young voices in the house, laughing. They played music, banged doors, roared away on motorcycles. I saw and heard these things and accepted them. They were there. I had no questions.

I could not open my mouth. My tongue tip traced the bits of wire and the new hole where it felt as if two teeth were gone in the upper row on the right, near the front but not right in front. And one tooth below them. That was where the glass straw went. It had a bend in it, to make it easier to suck while lying down.

For a time, vaguely remembered, there had been a broad starched woman in white, who had strong and gentle hands and clicked her tongue a lot. Bedpans, back rubs, changing dressings. And before that a different place, corridors, stretcher, shots.

Now there was only the small woman with the ruff of blond hair turning gray. Gentle brown eyes. When the wheelchair was first gone, I was afraid to lean on her as hard as I had to, when we made the endless journey down the hall to the bathroom. But she was strong, much stronger than she looked. I remembered that I used to see her in the night, in the rocking chair over there, always awake when I woke up.

It was my face in the mirror, but not my face. When the leg began to hold better under me and when the dressing was gone from my face, I would lean on the sink and try to decide just what was wrong. There were two long, healed incisions, stitch dots still apparent, dark red against the yellow pallor of the lost tan. It was something else that was wrong, not the red wounds. Something subtly out of balance, the way the bedroom was not quite true, with no corner exactly ninety degrees and the doorframe and window frame not parallel to either ceiling or floor.

I accepted, but I began to superimpose a question atop the acceptance. I had another world somewhere else, but the shape of it was murky. I did not want to try to bring it into focus. But it seemed to be coming nearer of its own accord.

It was easier to stay in this world. I knew what the little wire cutters on the bed stand were for. I had asked the woman, and she had said that if I vomited, I could choke to death unless she was there to cut the wires that held my jaw together. It had been broken in three places. And the cheekbone had been crushed.

It was easier to stay in this world where I knew that in the middle of the morning and in the middle of the afternoon, I had to sit in the rocking chair and slowly lift and lower my right leg. From ten times at first, with no weights, to a hundred times with the gadget she had made, a sailcloth wrapping with strings to tie it on and with pouches for the lead fish weights. The leg grew stronger, but it did not feel right. It felt numbed and prickly, as a limb does when it has gone to sleep and has started to come awake. Sometimes there were needles of pain from my toes into my hip. Sometimes the area around the ankle and the top of the foot would feel very hot or very cold or even as if it had a soaking wet stocking on it when it was dry and bare.

The doctor came. He snipped the wire. He made me work my jaw while he watched. He told me the woman would get me gum to chew. It would condition the jaw muscles. He shone a bright little light into my eyes. He made me strip and walk away from him and toward him while he watched my right leg. He told me to put the pajamas and robe back on. He said the leg was doing fine. He asked me my name. I told him it was Travis. He asked if there was more, and I said I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know my address. He made me count backwards, add figures in my head, spell long words.

One day she came to my room a little before dusk, as the tree was beginning to fill with birds. I had been sitting in the rocking chair by the window, watching the birds come home, watching the sky change. She pulled a footstool close to the rocking chair and put a hand on my arm and looked up at me in a way that was half mischief and half sadness. “Who am I?” It was her familiar question, and I knew the familiar response.

“You are Cathy,” I said.

In the last of daylight I took her hand and looked at it, at the weathered back of it, the little blue veins, the country knuckles. It seemed a very dear hand indeed. She knelt on the footstool and was closer and taller. I kissed her and felt the ridged area where the inside of my mouth had been stitched. Her brown eyes glinted in the last of the light. It was all strange and sweet and unemphatic, as though it were an inescapable extension of this unquestioned world, as natural and inevitable as all the rest of it.

I looked at her and said in a shaking voice, “You are Cathy! My God, I have been… What has… Oh, Cathy! Cathy!”

The whole back of my mind had been nailed shut. There was a creaking, straining, and the barrier tumbled, and it all came spilling out. The watery weakness ran out of my eyes and down my face, and I couldn’t make words. But she knew what had happened. She hugged me, laughing, crying, snuffling.

Candle Key. Cathy Kerr. That sagging, weathered old bayfront house of hard pine and black cypress.

She said, “Your houseboat, it’s tied on up to our old dock out there like before. And like before, there’s handyman stuff that’s piled up, when you’re feeling up to it.”

“We used to go out in your skiff and take Davie fishing.”

“Remember that day he caught into that shark and got mad at you for cutting it loose? He wasn’t even in school yet.” She touched her hair. “Now he’s near thirteen. I’m an old lady now, way over thirty, Trav.”

“Where’s your sister? Where’s Christine?”

“Just down the road. She married that Max fellow, and she had four more, six in all. The kids are in and out of here all the time. I tried to keep them quiet, but you know how it is. Max got into the land business, and you wouldn’t believe what he got us for the land that daddy left us the other side of the main road.”

“How many times are you going to have to put me back together?”

“This is only twice. And it was both of us needing it the first time. It could be forty times and never make up to you for what you did for me and what you lost of your own, a-doing it. I’ve got to call Meyer right now! I shouldn’t even have waited this long. He was closer to believing that fool doctor than he was me. I said it would be just a little time, and the doctor said maybe never.”

She gave me a quick kiss as she stood up. “Because you had a terrible terrible concussion and they thought there could have been some bleeding inside of your skull that cut off what you knew before somehow. Meyer being here three times and you not knowing him was terrible for him.”

She went swiftly to the door, and I saw the well-remembered way she moved, that quick light way of the professional dancer, quick of foot on those lithe, sinewy, lovely legs.

“What’s the date?”

“Hmm. The man on the television said this morning it was nine more shopping days til Christmas.”

She was gone, leaving me to try to fit my mind around that huge hole in time, Sprenger had killed me on the twenty-eighth day of September. Over two and a half months ago.

When she came back upstairs, she said Meyer said he would leave in ten minutes to drive down. The day was gone. She turned the lights on. I felt emotionally exhausted. I got into bed, and she sat beside me on the bed and held my hand and told me how Meyer had arrived in a rental boat the afternoon of that day with me in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in blankets with the left side of my face so horribly bashed in that my eye seemed to be out of the socket. I seemed to be alive but barely. Not alive enough to go through the routine of phoning an ambulance. They put me in her old pickup, and she had driven like a madwoman while Meyer had stayed back in the truck bed with me to keep me from bouncing around too much. They took me to Doctor Ramirez. The one who looked like a Swede. I suddenly realized it had been Ramirez who had been coming to see me here in Cathy’s house. He remembered me from before. Back when he and I started putting Lois Atkinson’s head back on. He treated me for shock. The three of them watched over me that night. The next day I was moved by ambulance to the little hospital in Homestead, where there was a surgeon Ramirez believed in, who could rebuild the left side of my face. Cathy told me I was full of alloy pins and plates and special wire. When I was well enough to be moved, I was brought back to her house by ambulance. She had quit her job in the village to take care of me.

“What did Meyer tell you about what happened? What did he tell Ramirez?”

She licked her lips. She wore an odd expression. “What happened, you and Meyer had come down into Florida Bay to do some fishing. You went out from the Flush in your fast little boat, and you went up on the bow to make something fast and gave Meyer the wheel, and he was going between some little islands when the steering cable broke, and he veered right into the island, you got threw headlong into the mangroves.”

“What’s the matter with my leg?”

“Your back got wrenched up, and it tore a nerve some. The si-sciatic? That’s it. But it’s coming along real good.”

“So where did Meyer get the rental boat?”

She straightened. “Any questions like that, you better ask him. I just wouldn’t know a thing.”

She fed me well, and I slept and was awakened at ten-thirty when she and Meyer came into the bedroom. He was beaming like a pumpkin with a big candle. I didn’t want him to notice the damned water running out of my eyes again. He didn’t notice because he kept turning his back to blow his nose.

Cathy left us alone and closed the door. He said, “The absolutely worst part of it, believe me, is to have nobody to tell.”

Nothing could have stopped him telling me. Davis had come aboard the Keynes at one in the morning, roused Meyer, and driven him down to Miami, where they picked up Sprenger and drove on down to Regal Marine. Sprenger and Meyer had waited near the public boat ramp while Davis drove to Regal and eventually arrived with the rental boat. Sprenger carried an elegant leather case, the shape of a gigantic dispatch case. It was custom fitted for two rifles, two scopes, ammunition, slings, cleaning equipment. Meyer managed to delay their arrival at No Name by routing them across flats where they could not risk planing speed. Sprenger had left Davis with Meyer in the boat behind the nearby island. He waded to the south end of the island and waited there a long time. He had fired one shot and then, at varied intervals, three series of six shots each. He came back to the boat and had Davis tie Meyer’s hand behind him, with one arm through the steering wheel. They left him alone.

“Distant firecrackers,” Meyer said. “And then nothing. One hell of a lot of nothing. Except heat. And bugs. Finally I wormed around and stood up on the seat and got my fanny on the edge of the steering wheel. I bounced on it three times, and on the third time it broke off. I got out of the boat and found a mangrove stub covered with barnacles and backed into it and rubbed until I frayed the rope in two. And lost some skin. There was an old gaff in the boat. I took it along. Where do those bluebottle flies come from? How do they know? They were so thick on Davis’s face, I couldn’t tell who he was until I scared them off. And the lounge was full of them. I thought you were dead. He was lying across you. Then I wondered why you didn’t have your share of flies. I put my ear next to your mouth and felt the exhalation. So I lifted him off you.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. I wasn’t tracking well. I didn’t know where to start. I should have got on the horn and called a Coast Guard chopper in. I never even thought of it. Everybody… everybody was so damned dead! You know? It makes it hard to think.”

“What killed him?”

“Five little holes in his chest, right through his black shirt. Centered, but just a shade to the right, I think. You could have covered them all with a playing card. Fantastic.”

“He shot her. Where did he hit her?”

“I don’t know. There was a hole right at the base of her skull, big as half an English walnut.”

That fitted the way she had gone down. Her mouth had been sagging open. So that was where the little slug had gone, into the back of her throat and on out.

“I got the boat and had a hell of a job getting the steering wheel back on. I never did. I had to push down on it to turn it. I got you into the boat. I couldn’t go back to Regal Marine. I hadn’t rented it. I’d taken time out to pull Davis inside and close everything I could and shove clothes into the broken ports and spray those damned hungry flies. I remembered Cathy and figured I could find this place from the Candle Key water tower. So I told her-”

“She picked it up from there. I know about Ramirez and Homestead. But what did you do then?”

“Okay, I had the feeling then that you were going to live. But I couldn’t think of any good way to explain what had gone on. I didn’t even know what had happened. So on the way back from Homestead, I stopped at Regal Marine. They weren’t worried about their boat, not with Davis’s car parked in their lot. I told them I was a friend of Davis’s, and we’d decided to keep the boat longer. I gave them two hundred dollars and said he was having good luck further down the Keys and sent me up to get his car. I showed them his car keys. I said it might be another few days. I went out and told Cathy not to wait. I drove Davis’s car to Miami and left it in a shopping center lot with the windows down and the keys in it. I took a bus to Homestead to see how you were and took another bus down to Candle Key. It was too late to do anything. I slept in this room, and in the morning I took the rental boat back out there. I tied a towel around my face. I had a little bottle with gasoline in it. It paralyzes the sense of smell. Every time it started to get through to me, I’d put a little on the towel. Even so, I wasted a lot of time running for the rail.”

“Jesus, Meyer!”

“By then it was self-preservation. Where would I fit if it all broke open? I’d fit in a cell somewhere. I kept thinking it was what you’d do. It was a McGee solution. But not my kind of thing. I wrapped them in that blue canvas you had, that roll of it. I sewed them in with that curved needle and that waxed twine. I wired that big rifle case of Sprenger’s to his ankles. After he was in the rental boat. Bodies are heavy. I cried once, Sprenger was so heavy, and I thought I couldn’t get him out of the lounge even. Not tears of sadness. Tears of rage. I kicked him. That’s a bad reaction. Were you saving that thirty feet of chain for something special, with the big links, this big? I wrapped it around and around her waist and wired it. It won’t come off.”

His voice was too thin and fast and high, and his eyes were strange. “Meyer, Meyer.”

“The thing I used for the third one, Davis, you’d described him, the moustache, Joe Namath haircut, I don’t know what it was, down in the aft bilge, heavy, like the end of an iron cage. Then when they were in the boat, I covered them with that big net, that gill net. I put two rods in the rod holders.”

“Take it easy.”

“I drank some of your gin. Out of a cup. Warm. A whole cup. I gagged and gagged, but I kept it down. Then I went across and under a highway bridge, and I went outside. I don’t even know what bridge. I wanted it to be calm out there, but it wasn’t. Whitecaps. I had to throttle way down, and it took forever to get out to where the Keys were just a line on the horizon. What do you say when you dump over three people in blue bags? My head is full of things. I couldn’t find anything I wanted inside my head. Then I remembered something. I looked it up later. From the Book of Mormon, the Book of Ether, chapter three.

“‘And the Lord said, For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you. Nevertheless, I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea; for the winds have gone forth out of my mouth, and also the rains and the floods have I sent forth. And behold, I prepare you against these things; for ye cannot cross this great deep save I prepare you against the waves of the sea, and the winds which have gone forth, and the floods which shall come. Therefore what will you that I should prepare for you that ye may have light when ye are swallowed up in the depths of the sea?’ Why did I remember that? I wish I knew.

“So I said amen and tipped them over the rail, and they went down. That cage thing caught in the net, and it took it along too. I had some headway, and the steering was stiff, so it held into the wind until the last and it started turning. When I got to the wheel, the wheel came off and before I could get it back, a wave came in and filled it half-full. The engine started missing, and I turned it toward land and opened it up. It drained the water out. I bit my tongue. I lost my lucky hat.”

“The Lion Country hat?”

He tried to laugh, but his face twisted and broke, and he put his head down into his hands and sobbed. It is the gentle people who get torn up. They can cope. They can keep handling the horrors long after the rest of us fade out. But it marks them more deeply, more lastingly. This was role reversal at its most bitter. I knew what he had to have, and I wondered for a moment at my own hesitation. Life seems to be a series of attempts to break out of old patterns. Sometimes you can. I reached and touched him on the shoulder.

“You did well,” I said. “You really did a hell of a job. You did exactly what you had to do. It was the right choice.”

So he straightened up, dabbed his eyes, blew his nose, smiled in a wan way. In a level, unemotional voice he told me the rest of it. There had been time to intercept the letters he’d left with Jenny Thurston, but he knew I hadn’t signed them. So let them go. Let the people look for Sprenger and Mary Alice. Take the chance that there were only five people who knew Mary Alice had left via Lauderdale aboard the Flush, and three of them were dead.

He had returned the rental boat, paying for the broken wheel, and had used Cathy’s old skiff to get out to No Name, day after day, cleaning up the evidence of violence, repairing the places where bullets had struck. He got the generator and the air conditioning operational. He threw out the perishables, which had spoiled in the heat. He did not get rid of Mary Alice’s belongings until he had found the treasure in the hidey hole he himself had invented. He had floated the Muсequita the hard way, with a hand pump. He had taken the lights off her, the fittings that had been damaged by Sprenger’s sniper fire, deep-sixed them, bought replacements, and with Davie Kerr’s help, rewired them. They towed the Muсequita to Candle Key, to a small marina with a good mechanic. The engines had been in the salt water too long. He had pulled them, rebuilt one, was nearly finished with the other. On an especially high tide they had left Christine, Cathy’s sister, to watch me, and Cathy, Davie, and Meyer had gone out and brought the Flush back and tied it up at the dock near the old house. He and Davie and Cathy had done a lot of work on it.

I asked him about Hirsh and the murder investigation.

He shrugged. “The guilty flee when no man pursueth. The law leaned on my old friend, but he had nothing to say. Yes, he had an investment arrangement with a Mr. Sprenger, who was in the bond business. The amount invested was a matter between the two of them. If Mr. Sprenger was dissatisfied, the money would be returned. Hirsh had to go to the bank when the tax people opened the box and took what was in it. He had to sign a release saying the contents were Sprenger’s. He gathered from the tax people that every single piece of paper relating to Sprenger’s personal affairs had disappeared along with Sprenger. When I gave him those three brown envelopes and he opened them and saw what they were, he asked me three times how I came to have them. I told him if he asked me once more, our friendship was over. He asked me what he was to do with them. I said that because, according to his own explanation, they were not sufficiently unique to be traceable as individual items, they should go back into stock. He said they would go into his box at the bank, in case somebody should come to claim them. He was eighty years old when I got there. When I left, he was fifty, going on forty-nine. He and Miss Moojah are running it alone.”

“Didn’t Goodbread come looking for me?”

“Oh yes. And Captain Lamarr. They came down here together, the two of them, after you were out of the hospital. They went to the hospital too. They were sorry you were so badly hurt. I think I had to tell them six times how you got hurt. When they talked to Ramirez, he remembered picking mangrove bark and splinters out of your face. It was a big help to have him remember that. There was a big fuss about the murder. General Lawson made a thirty-second television spot, offering a hundred thousand dollars for information leading to the whereabouts of Mrs. McDermit and/or Mr. Sprenger. It’s quieted down. It was a long time ago. The universe continues to unfold.”

It was after midnight. We were both exhausted. He stayed over, sleeping aboard the Flush. When I saw him at midmorning, he showed me what he had forgotten to show me the night before. He had a little folding viewer in his pocket, and he unfolded it and put a 35mm slide in it. I turned it toward the segment of sky in the top corner of my window. It was Hirsh’s photographic handiwork. It was the same lady I had seen in another world. In that world she had been in profile. On these three stamps, a strip of them without the little holes to tear them apart, she was turned and looking out at me. What had she said before? “Oh no, not you again!” She was in a different color this time, curiously close to the same color as that hat Mary Alice said Sprenger would recognize.

The lady in the stamp had a small, sulky, oddly erotic mouth and an expression of arrogant challenge.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“A gift from Hirsh to you. A personal, private gift.”

“I mean, did the lady have a name?”

“Are you serious? Her name was Queen Victoria!”

“Pardon me all to hell, Queen.”

“Here is the certificate of authenticity from the Royal Society. It’s an unlisted error, a double error, the wrong color and printed on both sides.”

I looked at the certificate. New Zealand Number 1, a horizontal strip of three, printed in scarlet vermilion instead of dull carmine. Recess printed. Fainter impression in same color on reverse. Unlisted. Unique. Authentic.

“What’s it worth?”

“Ten years ago an appraiser from Stanley Gibbons said forty thousand dollars. Hirsh says if you want currency, there is an auction coming up where it should be entered. I forget the details. For a while I thought you really needed the money.”

“You think I don’t? I’m down to-”

“I know, I know. I was going to buy you an apartment near Bahia Mar. A legal address. Near where your roots are. We’ve both been there too long to get rousted now by politicians.”

“Something changed your mind? You want to move away?”

“No. We had it wrong. You know how rumors are around Bahia Mar. It affects the squatters, that new ordinance. But it doesn’t affect commercial marinas. It doesn’t affect us. There’s been a celebration ever since Irv set us straight.”

“The Flush is at a good anchorage right here, Meyer.”

He looked very thoughtful. “I know. A man in your condition shouldn’t make too many decisions, maybe. Should I put Hirsh’s gift in the auction?”

“I… I think I’ll hang onto it for a while.”

“That means you’ll have to find a salvage job pretty soon, doesn’t it?”

I sensed the very first small tingle of anticipation, very faint, buried very deep. But authentic. “I just might,” I said. “I just might.”

There came a cold day in January, cold and fiercely bright, when I put on the sweater and wool pants she had brought me from a clothes locker aboard The Busted Flush, and I went downstairs with her and out through the wind. I was lighter than I had been since the operations long ago on my leg. I felt as if I was made of cornflakes, stale rubber bands, and old gnawed bones. I had come out of an endless old movie into arctic glare.

We went out to the Flush. She wanted to get me inside, out of the wind, but I wasn’t ready for that. I climbed the steep ladderway to the sun deck with convalescent care, crossed to the starboard rail, and stood looking out across the steel-gray bay under the hard blue sky. The old houseboat did not welcome me. It was not my boat. It had a problem in its guts, blood and stillness and bluebottle flies.

Cathy sensed something wrong and put her hand over mine where I grasped the rail. Something in her touch told me to remember the sweetness. I turned and looked down into those brown eyes, into that strange mix of humility and knowingness and pride.

I had to bend nearer to hear her as the wind tore at her words. “Like before,” she said. “Like it was if that’s what you want, what you need, when you’re ready. I could say it didn’t matter to me, I’d be lying.” She lifted her chin a little. “But either way, it wouldn’t be no obligation to you, Travis.”

“Cathy, I-”

“Don’t say about it now. Wait until you’re up to it.”

She heard her own words and looked startled and then blushed a marvelous pink and hid her face against my sweatered shoulder. It took her a few seconds before she could join my laughter. And right then I felt the deck change under my feet. The Flush seemed to shrug off her grisly preoccupation and look around and recognize me. She made us welcome. She had been as far away as I had, perhaps.

Cathy and I went below and had mugs of hot tea with cinnamon, and then she walked me back to the old house. Over the sound of the afternoon game on her television set, I could hear her out in the kitchen, singing as she fixed dinner, as far off key as she used to be, the last time I had lived here on Candle Key.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John D. MacDonald was graduated from Syracuse University and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Dorothy, had one son and several grandchildren. Mr. MacDonald died in December 1986.

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Table of Contents

THE SCARLET RUSE John D. MacDonaldTravis McGee #14 - 1973Chapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-oneABOUT THE AUTHOR